Abstract Painting

11/15/2014 Everything is Finished Nothing is Dead: An Article About Abstract Painting - The Brooklyn Rail
Art April 1st, 2003
Everything is Finished Nothing is Dead: An

Article About Abstract Painting
by Chris Martin
There was a time when abstract painting by its very definition was blazing new territory. Malevich
trembled with excitement as he wiped the slate clean, confident that his "desert of pure feeling"
could usher him directly into the higher reality. And it did. Mondrian understood that through the
balancing of vertical and horizontal lines, and the exact placement of primary color areas, he could
create a dynamic equilibrium that vibrated with the universal energy of life. And he did. Hilma Af
Klint followed the direction of "the guides" and surrendered herself to the new language of
abstraction, confident that great theosophical truths could be revealed. And they were.
I remember driving on the New Jersey Turnpike arguing with Phong Bui about who made the first
abstract painting. I said that Kandinsky had gradually camouflaged his imagery and made
abstractions by 1911. Phong said Kupka made completely abstract paintings in 1909 and that Arthur
Dove first showed abstract oil studies to Steiglitz in 1910. I said what about Serusier and his Talisan
painting from 1888 and Phong said that was just one painting and its still a landscape. I said
Victor Hugo made drawings in the 1850s like abstract Redons. We argued about Annie Besant and
Charles Leadbetter who made their Thought Forms in 1905, and Phong said those werent really
paintings. I said maybe the first abstract paintings came from Hilma Af Klint in her 1906 Paintings
From The Temple series. Just then Alfred Jensen woke up in the back seat and told us we were both
fools and asked what about the Mayans and the Tantra painters and the Peruvian carpet makers
and the American Indian rock painters and the Aboriginal dream-time bark painters and he told us
that we had just missed the exit for the Holland Tunnel right there in 2002.
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When the Abstract Artists Association started in New

York City in the 1930s there were barely a dozen
members, just a lonely band of abstract painters fighting
for respect from a hostile and uncomprehending public.
I remember I lived on Houston Street. I took methedrine
for two days straight and made hundreds and hundreds
of drawings only to drop them out the sixth story
window and watch them float gently one by one down
to the sidewalk below and the next morning only a few
remained next to a broken piano in a puddle by the
basketball court.
All around us a vast materialistic juggernaut surges

across America. We are rushing to buy the images of
pleasure that flicker across TV screens and glisten from
giant billboards. America is rushing to burn down the
Amazon, rushing to steal all the rainwater out of the
Sudan, rushing to obliterate mud huts with million dollar missles, rushing to build shiny SUVs out
of coyote bones, rushing towards death... There was a time here in New York City when heroes
walked the earth. In 1941 Mark Rothko lived at 29 East 28th Street. Clifford Still had a studio at 48
Cooper Square. Now history is finished. I climbed to the top of the Williamsburg Bridge and had a
sunset vision about the trembling possibilities of abstract painting but came down cold and hungry
with just a few dollars for pork buns and tea. I used to open the Ellsworth Kelly book to this 1958
photograph of Kelly, Kenneth Youngerman, Robert Indiana, and Agnes Martin taken on the roof of
Coenties Slip. That image had all the romance of the New York art world in it and most of all I loved
the way Agnes Martin looked in her white raincoat monumental and alert. When I approached
the delicate pencil lines and shimmering washes of color of an Agnes Martin painting I was
suddenly conscious of my own breathing. Agnes Martin says, "We are in the midst of reality,
responding with joy. It is an absolutely satisfying experience, but extrememly elusive..." Sometimes a
horizon line is a horizon line and sometimes not. Dan Walsh says "We still need a horizon." And I
agree.
Abstract painting contains powerful limitations and extraordinary freedom. Great abstract
paintings can be the result of a tremendous condensation of information. An abstract painting can
be a tight tough form with which to transmit huge content. Peter Acheson calls it "a hard nut
containing the whole tree". The painting enters vision fast but continues to flow into consciousness
as it releases its meaning slowly over time. We live with the image and it lives with us. This is what
the soul needs long periods of slow focused contemplation.
I had this dream: There was a big cocktail party in my parents house. A homeless man was lurking
behind the sofa. I recognized him vaguely as an old friend and a drunk. Then I realized it was
Rothko. We talked. He became strangely threatening. He showed me a matte black old forty-five
caliber revolver like the starter pistol my older brother kept in his bureau. I ran upstairs and
returned with a shiny new pump action 20-gauge shotgun. We met in the elegant drawing room
surrounded by chatting oblivious guests. He reached for his pistol and I blasted him once, twice and
again right in the chest. Red blood stained his burnt umber overcoat. I was euphoric. I had killed
Rothko!
We are not thinking about art anymore. We are out of our minds. We seek a blunt visual meaning
not just a riff on postmodernism, color field painting, psychedelic kitsch or whatever. We cant stop
talking about Forrest Bess who closed his eyes and painted the images inside his eyelids with utter
conviction. We are searching for this state of utter conviction. We digress and we stay up all night
talking about abstract painting. We talk about Yayoi Kusama who painted the dots that flowed
endlessly out of her own body and she painted them on canvases, on ladders, on couches, on naked
bodies, and all over the floor until she couldnt stop and then she did stop and disappeared into a
quiet room in Japan.
Ad Reinhart said this about his five-foot square black on black paintings, "This painting is my
painting if I paint it. This painting is your painting if you paint it." He was a great painter and could
be very very funny. When I first came to New York in the 1970s a lot of abstract painting had been
hijacked by people interested in conceptual purity and some kind of dogma of negation. They had
no sense of humor and consequently could never be taken seriously the way
Ad Reinhart was serious. But in 1978 I saw Mary Heilman paintings that had a sense of humor and
a sense of the a serious absurdity of things. The colors were as strong as they were in the tube. They
seemed inevitable and offhand like they just happened that way.
"If truth be known, abstract painting seems to have come to a bad end, with, to be sure,
underground pockets here and there," John Perreault wrote last year. Mondrian is buried in Queens
at Cypress Hills cemetery, one grave in an anonymous row of little headstones next to an old locust
grove in Block 51, grave #1191. I dressed up in a suit and a tie and went to see him. A small rabbit
darted from behind a nearby headstone. Now theres a hotel for movie stars in Los Angeles called
the Mondrian Hotel. Mondrian is dead and buried alive at the Mondrian Hotel under piles of new
laundry, under piles of periodicals and art magazines and scholarly articles and heavy books on
Mondrian. Abstract painting is finished: its marginalized, its minor, its dying and no one really
cares or notices. Huge Whitney Biennials are filled with miles of glossy photographs and political
installations and video installations and sound installations and computer internet installations and
moving sculptures with blinking lights and there are exactly three abstract paintings in the whole
museum and they look like decor.
And yet... Andrew Masullo is quietly sitting on the floor in the San Francisco night cradling a small
painting in his lap carefully painting and repainting the candy colored shapes and the spirit of
Florence Stettleheimer reclines on a miniature chaise-lounge perched on his shoulder and his very
own Forrest Bess painting is hanging on the wall behind him. Masullo sits quietly in his apartment
filled with hundreds of objects, his "little bits of nothing," each one carefully numbered. Masullos
paintings have an eccentric severity despite their snappy pinks and yellows. They are utterly
painstakingly subjective. Underneath a modernist naivet his paintings contain a quirky rightness
and an undeniable honesty. Abstract painting is modest plain revolutionary anonymous. Abstract
painting does not stand up and say, "Fuck Festivalism! Fuck this parade of international carnival
art fairs with endless hours of fun house videos, sound installations and talking sculptures,
screaming advertisements and sophomoric political propaganda." Abstract painting is silent.
Abstract painting is a humble hand-painted recognition of humanness.
Abstract painting isnt necessarily abstract. Abstract painting is not abstract but is filled with the
forms of the world, is filled with cracks in the sidewalk and light off the water and floor plans and
solar systems and an afternoon sunset in Bombay and the lumbering form of the big black bear
Brice Marden saw as it disappeared across the lawn of his studio in rural Pennsylvania. If Julian
Schnabel writes the words "70th Week" across a huge tarp painted with white forms that are not
accidental and not deliberate but wonderfully fucked up, is it an abstract painting? If Peter Halley
says that a rectangle is a piece of conduit or a prison cell and not a rectangle and it becomes some
kind of neon road sign of sociology and the rectangles disappear and just the savage color is left,
reborn as an absolute fact, is it an abstract painting? When we stand in front of a ten foot Ellen
Gallagher painting and zero in on the thumbnail sized black faces with staring rows of eyes and we
are swimming in a vast pink grid, is it abstract? When Tamara Gonzales pours white enamel over
the black lingham form that she has decorated with cake icing flowers, is it a Shiva puja or an
abstract painting? When is Carroll Dunham painting fuzzy knobs and when is he painting penis
noses? If Andrew Massullo carefully sprinkles the moist dirt he has been saving from the grave of
Alban Berg in Vienna onto the small canvas, is it an abstract painting? We are painting with the
bones of our ancestors, we are painting the endless forms of the world, and it was Kandinsky who
stated "Any form is possible if it arises out inner necessity."
I asked Kathy Bradford whether she was still an abstract artist. When she first came here from
Maine she made paintings of logs and old mountains and they got very thick and more abstract and
so she began to make abstract paintings and showed them in Soho. Then simple objects and clunky
figures started to come back into the work so that a painting would be abstract and later a figure
could be painted in it weeks later the figure could be painted out and it would be abstract again and
I asked her whether she was an abstract artist or not and she said "Im a freedom artist". In 1951 de
Kooning said "There is no style of painting now. There are as many naturalists among the abstract
painters as there are abstract painters among the subject matter school." And fifty years later its
true more than ever: there are no boundaries. There is slippage and if Sigmar Polke starts moving
paint and resin and meteorite dust and silk screens around in search of the alchemy of the moment
there could be an image or maybe not. Sometimes Polkes dots are playboy bunnies and sometimes
the dots are dots. For many of the best painters the abstract paintings and the figurative paintings
sit in the studio side by side think of Polke, Schnabel, Sillman, Offilli, Taaffe, Tomaselli. Strictly
speaking there is no such thing as abstraction and there is no such thing as painting and there is no
such thing as writing about abstract painting. Abstract painting is not old, abstract painting is not
new, abstract painting is happening in secret this moment, in abstract painting nobody knows
whats going to happen next. This is not a manifesto. Abstract painting is a state of mind, an
openness.
I met Tom Nozkowski years ago setting up his first show in Soho. He was up on a tall ladder
holding a small painting. The painting had a detail of a Giotto fresco the peeling back of the edge
of the sky and I said "Hey thats a Giotto" and he said "Yeah..." Nozkowskis paintings are born
out of a hand eye dance and his vast memory of other paintings, carpets, sculptures, architectures
and drawings and the shapes half glimpsed out the car window and the thousand details of the
Lower East Side and Shawangunk landscape that he knows and loves so fiercely. Out of the corner
of his eye Nozkowski sees a silver birch or maybe a striped traffic divider and weeks later they enter
the painting in the top left corner. Every day his paintings get weirder, more eccentric, more varied,
more truthful, more particular, more stubborn, and less predictable. His color is unnamable and
specific as if each panel contained its own weather and time of day. The new abstract painting says,
"Fuck you we will not stand guard at the tomb of modernism but neither do we feel pressed to
deliver the latest titillation..." The new abstract painting is in the same old boat the same leaking old
boat the same perpetual crisis of inventing the new language to tell the brand new same old truth.
We must grab this dusty skeleton of painting and (as Tom says) "make these bones speak..."
In 1979 I was sitting in the shadows of a Soho loading dock at 2:00 A.M. tripping on peyote and Bill
Jensen walked by. I got up and I just started following him. I was too shy to approach him, so I just
followed him through Soho down to Magoos Bar and then I went home. I never told him this. Bill
Jensen remembers being born on November 26, 1945, in a Minneapolis hospital room with white
tiles and green tile border a foot from the ceiling. He remembers his real father in an air force
uniform gazing down upon him in the crib and then leaving. He never saw him again. He says he
remembers it vividly like a scene from a Tarkovsky movie. Jensen studied painting with Peter Busa
at the University of Minnesota and moved to New York in 1971. At that time, he saw five Ryder
paintings at the Brooklyn Museum. He abandoned heavily impastoed large spiral paintings as the
materials caused severe illness. By 1975 he began his legendary small easel paintings which blazed
with inward compressed organic imagery. In 1978 he painted "The Black Madonna." In 1979 he
completed the masterpieces "Crown of Thorns" and "Ryders Eye." The work deepened and grew
strange: "The Tempest" (1981), "Spoons and Straws" (1984), "Denial" (1986), "Sea of Green" (1989-
90), "Bright Moments" (1992). In 1994 the paintings began to open to a more gestural empty
horizon line in "Colossus" (1993-4), "Stalker," and the great "Winters Light" of 1994. The paintings
continue to grow simultaneously more open and more concrete as in the recent "Images of a
Floating World" (1999-2001). Bill Jensen is a radical artist who harnesses the power of painting to
present inner realities. Abstract painting is a search for freedom. This freedom cannot be found in
style, or in details, large size, any particular forms, or in computers, new materials, old materials, or
in trying to find the end of some daydream railroad track of art history. This freedom is found
inside. There is no inside and there is no outside.
We were living on Houston Street in a six floor tenement building with no locks on the front door
and a steady stream of drug dealers, transients, crazies and dogs living in the hallways. The tiny
apartments were filled with poor hispanic families with up to ten people packed together. The
saxophonist Robert Aron had a huge lizard that ate cockroaches and one day when it escaped to
the apartment downstairs, the Chinese lady killed it with a broom and complained bitterly "We have
roaches, we have mice and rats, and now the big lizards are coming!" Painters lived there: Gary
Lang, Bob Kraus, Henry Chotkowski, Peter Acheson, Mark Potter. Jean Michel Basquiat slept on the
floor and Glenn OBrien lived across the hall. He used to knock on my door in the middle of the
night to look at art books. The super Joe Terranova had a pompadour hairdo and loved the young
artists in the building we were his "boys". So one night Peter is making abstract paintings on the
floor pouring gallons of yellow latex paint everywhere and at midnight the Puerto Ricans
downstairs call up the super to say that there is bright yellow pouring down from their ceiling and
the walls are turning yellow and Joe screams at them to stop taking drugs and shut up and dont
ever bother him again and next day tells Peter that the crazy Puerto Ricans were on drugs last night
and would you believe they were seeing the paint move on the walls.
What does it mean, "abstract" ? Does it mean to abstract

from something to start with an image and transform
it into essentials, like Mondrians tree series? Maybe it
means some kind of freedom from the image so we can
get directly to the serious part and not get lost in apples
or nipples. Maybe it means the big idea itself painting
as physics or philosophy. Maybe it means to be purified
or to be closer to concrete essences. Maybe its a formal
design strategy with invented rules, a graphing or
charting of information. There is no guarantee of
freedom in abstraction. In the suburbs of Seattle there
are Barnett Newman postcards on the refrigerator. Here
in Brooklyn the sidewalks are littered with caribou
bones and the taxi drivers are lost. They drive to the
airport and sit in the parking lot huddled in circles
around the ancient Kashmir firelight and never return
home. The painter Max Gimblett says "The impulse
moves between the instant and the gradual... In alertness and attention. In silence with the paint.
Painting is inherently mysterious, its a state of being where there is no recognizable Mind..."
I was twelve-years-old and all I wanted to do was play touch football. I was dragged to The
National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington DC. I remember we were walking around a
courtyard among these tall, shiny, red white and blue sculptures when the top of my head lifted off
and a sudden sense of euphoria filled my chest. We spent, I guess, twenty minutes clambering
around these soaring towers. The sunlight glinting off the new enamel paint filled me with the most
intense feelings of love and I KNEW THAT I KNEW and I never told anyone but I never forgot the
joy like some secret initiation. Years later I dropped out of college and worked as a guard at the
Guggenheim Museum. Browsing through an old catalog of the Paul Feely retrospective I felt a
shock of recognition my initiation came inside his Sculpture Court piece from 1966.
Seeing a group of Paul Feely paintings and watercolors at Lawrence Markey Gallery this November
I could not explain their presence. I mean I can see how they are painted the guiding pencil lines
are visible, the paint is stained directly into the cloth, the color is simple, the forms are subtle but not
complicated, and yet they radiate an authentic classical joy. Feelys paintings have a modest and
effortless lightness of being. There is an anonymous universal quality to the paintings like the side of
a house in Morocco, a painted sign in Brazil, or some tiny corner of the Taj Mahal. James Siena
once told me he liked to think of himself as an anonymous craftsman setting tiles one by one in the
Taj Mahal. Actually hes an extremely sophisticated abstract painter who loves baseball and uses
very, very small brushes. He focuses his humble laser beam attention on thin aluminum panels that
you can hold in your hands. In a tiny room in Chinatown, Siena sets up a simple set of rules or
strategies for each piece and follows them to their ultimate absurdly compressed conclusions. The
paintings remind me of Celtic illuminations, Peruvian textiles, computer chips, cellular structures,
or an LSD patterning flashback.They flicker, they glow, zigzag, vibrate, pulse and shimmer with
energy. Yet this Op dizzying vibration is really just the by-product of Sienas search to understand
and bring these structures to life. You follow the direction of a particular line in its convoluted path
from one place to another and the mind lights up. You can feel your own body watching your mind
watching.
Myron Stout is the secret hero of the new abstraction. Stout, the incomparable tortoise, began his
mature black and white work at age 47. In twelve years he finished three paintings, left five more
almost finished, and a few others restored with the help of an assistant. Stout endlessly caressed and
minutely adjusted the sublime edges of the white forms and black grounds, and now they radiate a
superhuman light and energy, and resonate in archetypal tragic harmony. For the last fifteen years
of his life Stout worked only on tiny drawings an inch in diameter, polishing and polishing. Can we
ever finish the paintings? How can we stop? In 1958 Jay De Feo began her big mandala painting
The Rose on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. She built up and scraped off layer upon layer of
paint. It was reproduced a year later in The Museum of Modern Arts Sixteen Americans catalog as
The Death Rose. She continued to work on it, trowling on massive amounts of lead white until it
became a veritable bas relief and eight years later when she and Wally Hedrick were evicted from
their studios they had to use a crane and moving men to carry the 2,300 pound painting through a
hole in the building. In 1976 David Novros began a series of very large abstract paintings on canvas
in his loft on Broome street. Twenty five years later he is still working on them. The paint is inches
thick but the light is unearthly and magnificent. They are almost finished; they will never be
finished.
Ive worked on individual paintings for twenty years. I have slides of paintings that were finished in
the early eighties and then repainted and photographed in the nineties and now once again theyre
almost finished. Its not that it takes twenty years to make the painting it takes seven minutes to
make the painting but it can take twenty years to find those seven minutes. Jim Harrison was a
great artist who worked on some works on paper for thirty years. He told me "You dont make the
painting the painting makes you..."
We are trying to paint what is real. We are trying to paint what we have never seen before.
CONTRIBUTOR
Chris Martin
CHRIS MARTIN is an abstract artist based in Brooklyn, NY.
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11/15/2014 Everything is Finished Nothing is Dead: An Article About Abstract Painting - The Brooklyn Rail

Art April 1st, 2003

Everything is Finished Nothing is Dead: An

When the Abstract Artists Association started in New

All around us a vast materialistic juggernaut surges

the soul needs long periods of slow focused contemplation.

What does it mean, "abstract" ? Does it mean to abstract

DAVID HUMPHREY with Phong Bui

NOV 2012 | ART

RONA PONDICK with Phong Bui

ROBERT FEINTUCH with Phong Bui

G. T. PELLIZZI and RAY SMITH with

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